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Linux-based networking vendor Vyatta is out today with its Vyatta Community Edition 5
(VC5) release, including a host of new security and performance improvements.

Vyatta has been offering an open source alternative to proprietary networking gear
since 2006, and
with the new release is aiming to expand its share. The new Vyatta release comes as the
big networking vendors Cisco and Juniper
roll out new silicon to provide greater high-end capacity and network performance.
Vyatta, however, isn't necessarily after the high-end of the market.

"The ultra high end of the market will always be silicon switching," Dave Roberts,
vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta told InternetNews.com. "The
question is how far can go with software."

Vyatta develops software that can run on commodity hardware powered by Intel or AMD
processors. Vyatta also offers its own hardware
appliances that also use general purpose Intel or AMD processors. Roberts argued that
as Intel and AMD push the envelope on general purpose processor capabilities, software
based routing technology will continue to grow and scale.

With the VC4
release in April of 2008, Vyatta began to target larger networking need which is
something that the new VC5 release builds upon.

VC5 includes an open source Snort-based Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that will
alert network administrators to potentially malicious traffic. The IPS will also block
the bad traffic as opposed to just watching it go by.

Vyatta is also taking further advantage of the open source Squid proxy engine to
perform URL filtering. Roberts commented that Vyatta provides URL signature sets to help
networks block content by category and that users can also manually block URLs via the
management GUI.

Squid is also being used to help provide improved Web performance by caching commonly
accessed content. Commercial networking vendors have been pushing WAN optimization and
acceleration technology to the tune
of $1 billion in 2008. Roberts said that Vyatta is not currently in that market, though
that could change.

"You may see us trying to after that market (WAN acceleration) as well," Roberts said.
"I'm not sure if we'll integrate that into the core Vyatta release or as a standalone
separate product -- we'll see how it rolls out."

Virtualization is also a big theme of the Vyatta release. With VC5, Roberts claims
that Vyatta has further optimized the ability of the network software to run within a
paravirtualized environment that can access storage and network interface drivers. The
deployment of Vyatta virtualized could take on a number of different scenarios.

One scenario is a physical piece of hardware running a virtualization hypervisor that
has Vyatta and an another enterprise application such as CRM or VoIP. Roberts noted that
today the virtual image management would be done via the hypervisor, though he hinted
that Vyatta has some future news in that area.

By having a virtualized networking engine alongside an application, the implication is
that application latency can be reduced. On a physical level, Cisco's soon-to-be launched
"Project
California" blade server has a physical networking engine on which virtual
application can run. HP ProCurve has a similar effort underway called
ProCurve One.

"Some of the bigger deployments we're working on with folks in a virtualized context
are around reducing latency or making a custom app work really well," Roberts stated.
"Suffice it to say their are folks out there that have networks or applications that are
very latency sensitive, and the fact that you can mix the network and the application
together on a single piece of hardware is a big benefit to them."